By Hal Brown, MSW
Read my gazillion stories about Trumpology: The Psychological Study and Analysis of Donald Trump here
Let’s start with this before I get to Trump.
I watched the video Trump now has pinned to the top of his Twitter page:
I found it interesting though not surprising that he ended it with one of his most mocked video clips, one which spawned many screen grabs published in countless articles and is often referred to as Trump humping the flag. I won’t subject you to seeing more photos of Trump. Here’s an image search for Trump hugging flag. This flag hugging video from CPAC prompted articles like this: ”Tomi Lahren (a Fox News contributor) Says Trump Groping The Flag Is #RelationshipGoals. Twitter Disagrees” with a sample of snarky tweets in reply.
This man is so lacking in self-awareness that he may think his doing this reflects well on him with anyone not in his cult. This man equates hugging the flag with patriotism in a video where he blatantly tries to convey that he won a Nobel Peace Prize.
After watching this video (and receiving a private message from a reader about humor and Republicans) I was reminded of the story I posted about how we’ll welcome having healthy humor in the White House after four years of Trump. I thought it was worth posting again. I know many Kos readers are loath to look at Trump’s Twitter account, first I’ll share some of the reactions to Trump’s self-aggrandizing tweeted video which were posted in the replies:
None of the above replies are particularly funny. The “he did nothing” one showing that Trump literally has blood on his hand above is grim.
Given what we’ve all been suffering through with four years of Trump and Trumpism, I thought that it would be good to post my humor story again. None of us will feel free to really laugh until Trump has been exiled once and for all to Mar a Lago. As a therapist I think the wound to his ego will fester and I believe he stands a good chance of having a true psychiatric breakdown into delusion psychosis beyond what we’ve been observing since the election.
Enough of this...
Here’s my story from Nov. 29, 2020:
The illustration above shows the top nine photos from the Getty Images search for Biden laughing, see the all here. Note that three of them are with President Obama. Those were the good old days when we had healthy humor and laughter in the White House.
Introduction:
Wikipedia defines Schadenfreude as the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a complex emotion where, rather than feeling sympathy, one takes pleasure from watching someone's misfortune. This emotion is displayed more in children than adults. However, adults also experience schadenfreude, although generally they conceal it.
I usually look at HuffPost first thing in the morning just to see which story they considered important enough to put on the top of their page. This morning the main story was a depressing, if unsurprising one. I didn’t have to read it. What did catch my eye was the story in the lower left about how Kamala Harris reacted when asked about Trump running in 2024.
This featured a tweet with a video of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris reacting to being asked about Trump running again in 2024 (scroll down tweet below and play video):
This got me to comparing her spontaneous hearty laugh to the soon to be without a job current vice president and then of course to the the deposed president in the laughter department.
I tried to remember an instance of either Trump or Pence laughing spontaneously and all I could come up with is seeing clips evil laughter. Search Trump and laughing and you’ll find articles like “James Comey says Donald Trump never laughs. Is he right?” and “Why Donald Trump never laughs, according to his niece.” You’ll also find videos like those below with examples of his evil laughter and sick sense of humor
You can tell a lot about someone by considering what they consider funny enough to laugh out loud at. Freud wrote an entire book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, about it. Humor has been written about in the popular media and there’s even an entire journal devoted to research about humor published by The International Society for Humor Studies.
In the article “11 Signs That Someone Might Be A Toxic Or Evil Person” this is listed first:
1. They Take Pleasure In Other People's Misfortune
You trip and they laugh hysterically. There's bad news on TV, and they get out the popcorn. This, um... happy reaction to other people's misfortune is known as schadenfreude. It's defined as "exquisite joy and smug satisfaction from contemplating and reveling in the misfortune of others," according to Adrian Furnham, Ph.D. on Psychology Today. Pretty creepy, to say the least.
Go down the list and with perhaps a couple of exceptions it reads like a psychological profile of Donald Trump.
With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we have two psychologically healthy individuals who don’t laugh at the misfortune of others unless you want to count the VP2B’s laughing at the absurd prospect of Trump running for president again.
There are daunting challenges ahead for the new administration, for example:
I am worried about the last challenge above. Because of their personalities, which are reflected in their sense of humor, I believe that Biden and Harris can sit down and work out compromises with the four members of the “Squad: Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and the other House progressives.
AOC, who seems to be the unofficial leader of the Squad or at least the best known in part because of having Trump attack her the most, definitely has a sense of humor. Her dancing video was viewed on YouTube alone a million times.
The Poll:
I put a poll on a story last week listing these symptoms of stress asking how many readers were experiencing them. Even with only 104 responding the results were disturbing. Not on the list but definitely a sure sign stress is getting to you is not being able to laugh at things you used to be able to laugh at. Consider on the poll to what extent you can distract yourself from your worries, say by watching a funny movie, and be able to actually laugh out loud.